How Labour would reopen schools and support students – Kate Green

For many families, who have struggled through the last four weeks of balancing home learning, childcare and work commitments, this news will come as a blow.

And Boris Johnson’s statement left serious questions unanswered. He should have set out the benchmarks that need to met for the return to happen on March 8, the further adaptations and safety measures that will be in place in school, and provided clarity on whether all years will go back at once or if we will see a staggered return.

Rather than drip feed information, the Government should be urgently ramping up the support for families in this lockdown. With parents playing the roles of mum, dad, teacher, worker and many more besides, it is not surprising many feel stressed and abandoned.

Labour has called for this support, starting with a legal right to request flexible furlough for childcare reasons and cancelling the planned cut to Universal Credit. The Government has been nowhere, and is damaging children’s education, household finances and the security of our country as a result.

From the start of the pandemic, Labour has been clear that safeguarding our children’s education should have been a top priority. We have called on Ministers to deliver a plan to protect children’s learning and now to get them safely back into school. Instead we have seen more dither and delay.

Four weeks into this third lockdown and hundreds of thousands of pupils still lack the equipment needed to learn online with over 423,000 of the Government’s promised laptops yet to reach the children who need them.

Labour’s Every Child Online campaign sets out five clear steps to get children online and learning throughout this lockdown.

In supporting schools to keep children in the classroom, Labour has urged the Government to reconsider its approach to rotas, the system whereby pupils spend a week or two in school and then a similar period learning remotely.

Scientists agree rotas can be an effective way of breaking chains of transmission, reducing the spread of the virus and enabling social distancing within schools. Yet, despite this support from scientific advisors and school staff, the Government changed its guidance in early November to prohibit the use of rotas.

In September, Labour called for school pupils to be prioritised for testing to minimise disruption to learning. Again, the Government dithered and delayed, finally announcing mass testing in schools just hours before the start of the Christmas holidays.

Earlier this month, it became clear this testing programme did not have the support of the UK’s medicines regulator and the Government has been forced to rethink, but have still not given schools the support and personnel that will be needed to deliver mass testing.

Right back in June, Sir Keir Starmer called for nightingale classrooms, to create space for social distancing, which would support reopening without sending school staff into overcrowded classrooms. The Government has not mentioned this option at any stage.

Last term, we told Ministers of the urgent need to review their decision to cut funding to help schools cover the costs of making classrooms Covid-secure. Schools Minister Nick Gibb said schools would have to pay for Covid adaptations out of their existing budgets. This forced some schools to make the difficult decision to use funding for support to catch up on lost learning, to pay for safety measures to help keep children in school last term and to support their return to school this term.

Time and again Labour has proposed measures which could have helped keep more pupils in school throughout last term and which should be part of a plan to support safe reopening now. Time and again the Government have dismissed, implemented too late without proper planning, or simply ignored these proposals.

This Conservative government has failed our children and continues to do so. Once again, this week we see the Government making announcements it does not know how to deliver. Children are rapidly becoming the forgotten victims of this government’s inability to plan, damaging their education, wellbeing and futures.

Kate Green is a Labour MP and Shadow Education Secretary.

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